Australia is at a tipping point for electrifying transport as more than half of the country’s trucking fleet is due for replacement, and needs to act to avoid a repeat of the current fossil fuel crisis, a leading transport and energy expert says.
Bruce Hardy, the head of Energy Futures Foundation, an independent not-for-profit and non partisan group focused on transport and energy, says Australia would not be facing the fossil fuel supply issues it is now had it learned and acted on the hard lessons of the last two crises.Â
“This was the same pattern during [the] COVID [pandemic in 2020]. It was the same pattern when Russia invaded Ukraine [in 2022],” Hardy told the Smart Energy Conference in Sydney on Wednesday.
“The fundamental point here is that we are a small island nation at the end of very long supply chains, as our politicians are very glad to tell us, and we are importing fuel to power the arteries of our economy, instead of relying on the electrification potential within our fleet.”
Hardy says 56 per cent of the trucking fleet in Australia is approaching replacement; if they’re replaced with new diesel trucks, that will lock the country into another 15-20 years of fossil fuel use.
“We’ve got this tipping point in the market,” he says.
“There’s a window in the next five years where if we offer that fleet a meaningful pathway to zero emissions and to electrification, we will have a tremendous opportunity to accelerate that curve, which is currently sitting in an abominable last place.Â
“Now is the time to act from a perspective of changing over the trucks. Now is the time to think about what it is that we need to have, both from an industry perspective and also from an energy system perspective.”
Part of the problem is that forecasts for electric trucking may now be well out of date.Â
Treasury’s numbers in its net zero transport plan last October predicted just 20 per cent of the trucking fleet would be electric by 2050.
Hardy describes that scenario as “catastrophic”.
“It actually puts the entire economy into peril,” he says.
Must fix cost and charging
But Australia also faces a real challenge of convincing truckers to switch, and would face an equally real problem if all of them decided to go electric at once.Â
While electric trucks are as much as 70-80 per cent cheaper to run, the upfront cost of buying the vehicles is a sticking point. And the charging infrastructure has not been built.
“In Australia most trucking companies are small to medium businesses in the order of turning over $500,000 of revenue, not $50 million … how can you help that sector jump that upfront cost hurdle into this electric future?” Hardy says.
“When we need to run freight supply chains between Melbourne and Sydney, between Adelaide and the north, these are enormous stretches of road that we need to think about how to electrify.Â
“We are not putting in charging infrastructure nearly as fast as we need to.”
Obstacles include distribution network service providers (DNSPs) taking two years to approve connections.
Hardy wants regulators, politicians and those who manage energy infrastructure to start thinking about electric trucking as a national project, rather than something that individual companies or DNSPs need to deal with on an ad hoc basis.Â
“This electrification journey, it is bigger than anything else in the energy market, from a storage perspective, from an opportunity perspective, when we think about that load coming onto the grid, the trucks are ready now,” he says.
See The Driven’s detailed EV sales data here:Â Australian electric vehicle sales by month in 2026; by model and by brand.
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